Via NarcoNews. Colombia-San Francisco Bay Area drug pipeline helped finance CIA-backed Contras Published: Aug. 18, 1996 BY GARY WEBB Mercury News Staff WriterFOR THE BETTER PART of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. This drug network opened the first...

Via NarcoNews Role of CIA-linked agents a well-protected secret until now Published: Aug. 19, 1996 BY GARY WEBB Mercury News Staff WriterIF THEY'D BEEN IN a more respectable line of work, Norwin Meneses, Danilo Blandon and ''Freeway Rick'' Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing. This odd trio -- a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a driven ghetto teen-ager -- made fortunes creating the first mass market in America for a product so hellishly desirable that consumers will literally kill...

Via NarcoNews Contra case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.A. dealer faces life Published: Aug. 20, 1996 BY GARY WEBB Mercury News Staff WriterFOR THE LAST YEAR and a half, the U.S. Department of Justice has been trying to explain why nearly everyone convicted in California's federal courts of ''crack'' cocaine trafficking is black.Critics, who include some federal court judges, say it looks like the Justice Department is targeting crack dealers by race, which would be a...

by Alfonso Chardy, Herald Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- Some of President Reagan's top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have concluded. Investigators believe that the advisers' activities extended well beyond the secret arms sales to Iran and aid to the contras now under investigation. Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example,...